


Blessed Are They That Weep

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: AU - Canon Divergence, Gen, I am allergic to poor story arc resolution, Lt. Mom's Misfit Children, misfits making a family, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 15:24:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7897864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sonny learned a lot of hellfire in his youth, but he learned a whole lot about mercy, too.</p>
<p>Where Mike recovers (slowly) in the hospital, Chief Dodds is an appalling excuse for a father, and family is what you make it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blessed Are They That Weep

Sonny does his damndest to give everybody the benefit of the doubt. He can't help it - it's ingrained somewhere in him, forgiveness and mercy and the cast-down eyes of the crucified Lord. Even the worst of the perps, weaving lurid fantasies in the box, sweating it out good-cop-bad-cop, calls up the distant whisper: what-if. 

Put him at odds, more than once, with sarge. Sarge coming in seeing the world as black and white as the ass-end of a zebra, spouting off the chief's trite little syllogisms like a wind-up toy, and Sonny hadn't especially liked it coming from the chief but sarge, in sarge that whisper came louder. What-if. Look at his eyes. Look at the eyes that cringe tender and sad. The son of the father but not at all the father's son.

Sonny had not ever much liked the chief. As a good Catholic, he would forgive his bullish trespass into the squadroom. But he had not ever much liked him. This was a man it was hard to imagine as young, a man it was difficult to picture would lean over a child and kiss his soft cheek and say good night, sleep tight.

Off-hand, his lieutenant on Staten Island had mentioned going to a barbecue in his beat-cop days, playing softball with Chief Dodds against the firefighters. Chief Dodds' boys there, too. A long time ago, two boys at the edge of the diamond craning from the dugout, one now lately grown to sergeant, the other a smudge in history. Sonny remembered this, of course - he can't help it, good Catholic boy, to recall the smallest faintest words in whatever archaic text as he remembers cold-damp-basement casefiles and legalese - but set it back carefully inside his mind. Chief Dodds spoke of Son in singular: his pride and joy. Who would not be proud? Any father could be proud of such a man as Sergeant Michael Dodds, even Chief Dodds, who seemed not satisfied with anything that could not serve him purpose. Student, soldier, beat-cop blue and gold badge on his hip now.

Compassion, too. A rumpled softness underneath a coarse hide woven from the Chief's teachings. A softness in his eyes, a tenderness that Sonny sets back, as with the lost son, in his heart. The lieutenant's patience with him is unflinching: your father might be chief, but he is not in charge here, and neither are you. Sonny had come into this place, too, blue-blooded and champing at his words like cigars in old men's teeth in flag-decked bars. Sonny had come up against her, Lieutenant Benson, as a frontal boundary breaks on the weather map or skin comes hard to pavement, like washing, like the shearing of blood, and healing new. She shook him out like a musty rug, and he'd had to learn it was alright, to show his eyes. To hold small hands. To remember whispered things.

The banners of his heart beam in the sun: of justice foremost and mercy too. Liv says: you're a good cop. Says to sarge, he imagines: you're a good cop, without your father.

Sonny remembers the other boy, echoed on linoleum tiles in a cramped squadroom that had not seen the sun or even pine-sol since perhaps Eisenhower. 

How very like the chief, his bitter bloodied lips chide him, to pick and choose, to discard what is not useful to him, to hone only that which is sharpest to his needs. How very like him.

Sonny urges: patience, and forgive.

But in the hospital - in its place of perpetual shadow and words caught on tongues, a place he spends too much of his time - the other boy survives his place in Chief Dodds' world (as nothingness) and becomes a form and voice. Chief Dodds ignores him in the hard city way you ignore the doped-out, the homeless, the sick and the jangling cups of change and voices limned in subway grime. Even when Mike - soft-edged Mike, without his shield or gun - looks at his brother, Chief Dodds places the other son firmly where he belongs outside existence.

The brother clings to the corner of the room. Stakes out a claim. Becomes himself, an unshakeable ghost. He is thin, terribly thin, and Sonny feels the disjointed urge to feed him. He is dope-sick thin, and pale, and yet unmistakably the brother, reflection of the fragmented son tucked neatly into hospital sheets. They share eyes, they share mannerisms and lately the faintness of voice. Mike finds it tiring to speak, and accepts Amanda's iPad and netflix propped on his lap with a smile and a thank you dredged from depths. Amanda, God bless her, navigates the razor-wire trapeze of familial dysfunction with a disarming smile. She speaks to Chief Dodds with milk-and-honey civility, but asks about his other son and wife in the same tone as Mike, even when he ignores her. She persists. Chief Dodds leaves citing work. He touches his son's - his living breathing historical son's - hand and Mike's eyes slip shuttered closed. He seems to flinch. 

Amanda shares this look with Sonny. They know some things. They remember. 

Mike had nearly died. For a long time hung there on the precipice. Sonny could see the brother in the corner, thin and wan and wasted and surreal as a ghost, twisted inside from the heroin scathing his bones and twisted inside from the want of his brother. Sonny had seen him, in the rare moment that Chief Dodds was not holding sentry, kneel beside his brother's bed and cry and cry and say I'm sorry, I'm sorry Mike, I'm sorry, I love you, I love you. 

Amanda is flicking through her account. A library of ten years back of every famous family falling apart on national television. This one? She asks. This? 

Mike says: can't we just watch Die Hard? He is tired but the laugh leaks through his wounded eyes. Amanda touches his hair, briefly, softly, like a sister. 

Jesus said: suffer the little children, to come unto me. Jesus took to him the sinners and the lepers, the weak and the wounded, the limping and the lost. You learn a lot of hellfire and brimstone, growing up a good Catholic boy. Like Sonny. Like Mike. 

You learn a lot of kindness, too. The parish priest playing football with the kids after mass, still in his cassock. The nuns at St. Mary's hospital and their hands unfolding from prayer like wings to touch the fevered skin of patients, to whisper God like lifelines back to shore. You can't help but learn the mercy, remember the moments of forgiveness, eyes cast to the ceiling of the confessional, the deep patient voice and the tremble of absolution in the belly.

Amanda laughs: Die Hard, she says. That's a Christmas movie.

Sonny says, to the ghost in the corner: Matt. 

The jangled limbs move and the wide eyes not really so much younger than his own come forth from among the blips and beeps and the creaking of a hospital chair. The voice is thin and hoarse, the voice is change in cups, the voice is subway grates padded with cardboard. The voice is rehab in Mexico and speed by the handful for sweaty dollar bills. 

Matt, he says. Mike looking up at him, piercingly curious, not unlike his face when Sonny explained Liv to him. Matt, what should we watch.

Matt unfurls. Edges closer. When dad was gone, he whispers, when dad was at work, we used to stay up late and watch the nature shows, Wild Kingdom. Remember, Mike?

Mike nods. Things you don't forget. Some sacred things.

Izzat on netflix? Matt asks. Trembling. He had been holding on by broken nails and will, outside the life of his father, crying for his brother. And Sonny has to marvel: how the body remembers family. Sonny has to wonder: what is family, at all. 

Mike nods. We got Mutual of Omaha on that thing? 

Amanda smiles. Matt comes to perch close by his brother and wary still of anything but. 

I think we'll find something, she says. I think that sounds good.


End file.
